Background
Her father Ramón Medina Nebot was Spanish from the Canary Islands, and her mother was English.
Her father Ramón Medina Nebot was Spanish from the Canary Islands, and her mother was English.
Born in Liverpool, Lancashire, Medina began acting as a teenager in the late 1930s. She worked her way up to leading roles in the mid-1940s and left England for Hollywood. In 1950"s Fortunes of Captain Blood, she teamed with British actor, Louis Hayward.
She and Hayward subsequently appeared together in 1951"s The Lady and the Bandit, Lady in the Iron Mask and Captain Pirate from 1952.
Darkly beautiful, Medina was often typecast in period melodramas such as The Black Knight. Two of her more notable films were William Witney"s Stranger at My Door and Orson Welles" Mr.
Arkadin, based on episodes of the radio series The Adventures of Harry Lime, itself derived from The Third Manitoba film. Although prolific during the early 1950s, her film career faded away by the end of the decade.
In 1958, she performed in four episodes as Margarita Cortazar on Walt Disney"s American Broadcasting Company series, Zorro.
In 1958, she also appeared as "The Lady" Diana Coulter in Richard Boone"s Columbia Broadcasting System western series, Have Gun, Will Travel. She was then cast in an episode of Darren McGavin"s National Broadcasting Company western series, Riverboat. In 1960, she was cast as different characters in two episodes ("Fair Game" and "The Earl of Durango") of the American Broadcasting Company western series, The Rebel.
Medina also made television appearances on Perry Mason ("The Case of the Lucky Loser", 27 September 1958).
Bonanza ("The Spanish Grant", 6 February 1960), Thriller ("The Premature Burial", 1961), The Alfred Hitchcock Hour ("See the Monkey Dance", 9 November 1964) and The Manitoba from U.N.C.L.E ("The Foxes and Hounds Affair", 8 October 1965). Medina guest starred as Ruthanne Harper in "Incident of the Boomerang" in 1961 and Ilona Calvin in "Incident at Jacob"s Well" in 1959, on Rawhide.
In 1968, she returned to the big screen in Robert Aldrich"s adaptation of the lesbian-themed drama, The Killing of Sister George. In 1998, she published an autobiography, Laid Back in Hollywood: Remembering.
Medina married Joseph Cotten on 20 October 1960, in Beverly Hills at the home of David O. Selznick and Jennifer Jones.
Number children were born from either marriage. Medina died at age 92 on 28 April 2012, from natural causes at the Barlow Respiratory Hospital in Los Angeles, California. Her remains are buried at Blandford Cemetery in St. Petersburg, Virginia, beside Joseph Cotten.